1,590 Framed Works and 19 Sculptures Descend on Dia:Chelsea

Hanne Darboven’s magnum opus is being shown for the first time in ten years.

December 22, 2016, 4:10pm

Kulturgeschichte 1880-1983 installation view, Hanne Darboven. Photo by Bill Jacobson Studio. All photos courtesy of Dia Art Foundation

In terms of sheer artistic output, few artists come close to Hanne Darboven, whose feverishly abundant installations often possess hundreds and in some cases thousands of perfectly aligned photographs, image collages, and hand-written numbers. The late German artist’s installation Kulturgeschichte 1880-1983 (Cultural History 1880-1983) is currently on view at Dia:Chelsea for the first time in more than ten years. It consists of 1,590 framed works aligned in sequential grids, accompanied by 19 sculptures scattered throughout the expansive 22nd Street space.

A sort of gesamtkunstwerk, Darboven’s installation feels like a visual encyclopedia chronicling a menagerie of social, political, and personal histories of the artist. References to Hollywood and World War II, along with covers of the German newspaper Der Spiegel, are intermixed with the artist’s own autobiography, as if proclaiming the inescapable interconnectivity of culture at both a microscopic and macroscopic level.

But Kulturgeschichte 1880-1983 isn’t just a random jumbling of visual and textual information. Darboven’s magnum opus is separated into various sections possessing different artistic intentions and different flows and rhythms of energy. “Each of the seven sections within Kulturgeschichte 1880-1983 begins very cohesively and progresses to ever more varied and disorderly formats. There’s a marked difference between the organization of the first and last series,” Megan Witko, an assistant curator at the Dia Art Foundation, tells The Creators Project.

“As many others have noted, the calendar is a major organizing principle within Darboven’s work, and it provides the appearance of objectivity while allowing her to create an entirely subjective artistic system behind it. At times, Darboven is more concerned with the concept of a system that she is in than the actual system itself,” adds Witko.

The dispersed sculptural works of Kulturgeschichte 1880-1983 feel strangely out of place next to the highly ordered, 2D wall pieces. An oversized Moka Pot-Robot hybrid, a teddy bear, and a cross adorned with images of Jesus and a soldier seem to share little in common with one another, let alone beside hanging Der Spiegel covers of Ayatollah Khomeini and UFOs, but perhaps it is their divergent qualities that drew Darboven to include them amongst the 1,590 framed works.

“Unlike the works on paper which have a numbered system inscribed on them, the sculptures are more in flux and have been arranged in differing positions each time this work has been installed,” Witko explains, “A key thrust of the work is the element of juxtaposition and unexpected connections that are made—between differing parts of the work as well as between the work and your own life. The sculptures and their positions within the overarching structure of the two-dimensional works serve to create and enhance these juxtapositions.”